A single mother's life is thrown into turmoil after her struggling, rarely-seen younger brother returns to town.

A lot happens at once to Sammy, a single mom living in the Catskill town of her birth, where her parents died in a car crash when she was small. Her son Rudy, who's 8, begins imagining his unseen father as a hero; she picks up, sort of, with last year's boyfriend; she gets a new boss who imposes foolish rules; and, her wayward brother Terry arrives for a visit after months of no communication. The boyfriend proposes, the relationship with her boss takes an unexpected turn, and her brother and son bond, not always with positive consequences. When Terry asks young Rudy if he wants to meet his father, a crisis of sorts ensues, and brother and sister must re-frame their relationship. (J. Hailey & Amazon.com)

You Can Count On Me starts with a terrible car crash that instantly orphans a little boy and his older sister. At film's end, that boy, now a grown-up nomad and ne'er-do-well, takes off by Greyhound after a brief reunion with his sister, who lives at permanent anchor in their unspoiled hometown. The sibling saga that unreels between wrenching collision and bittersweet separation celebrates the idiosyncratic ways wounded folk like Terry (Mark Ruffalo) and Sammy (Laura Linney) put one foot in front of the other, both energized and hamstrung by the knowledge that nothing is ever certain in the road-movie of life. During his visit, Terry roils Sammy's becalmed existence, mostly by "fathering"--for good and ill--her overprotected 8-year-old (Rory Culkin), sneaking him out to play empowering bar pool, later introducing him to the weaselly dad he's fantasized into a superhero. Sammy starts a torrid affair with her married boss at the bank (Matthew Broderick gives delicious bureaucratic smarm), and considers marrying her sometime suitor (Jon Tenney), sweetly dull yet dependable. The narrative peaks here are human-sized, elevated by gentle humor and clear-eyed faith in the existential importance of these intersecting small-town lives. Linney is simply superb as Sammy, wild girl gone good, involuntarily "mothering" every man in her life. An authentic original, newcomer Ruffalo gives his modern-day Huck Finn a drawling, James Dean delivery tuned somewhere between a screwup's whine and the twang of pothead wisdom. (Hard to think of another recent film that so deftly nails down the rich dynamics of everyday conversation--the starts and stops, circumlocutions, clichés, sudden veers into revelation and eloquence.) This is that rarity, an action movie of the heart: no explosions or epiphanies, yet everything evolves through the catalysts of character and experience. (Kathleen Murphy, Amazon.com)